iPad

Wal-Mart has confirmed that it will start selling the iPad in its stores starting Friday, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

According to the report, Apple's tablet initially will be available in "hundreds" of Wal-Mart locations. The big box retailer plans to have the iPad in over 2,300 stores by mid-November to capitalize on the holiday shopping season, the Journal reported.

Wal-Mart will sell all six versions of the iPad at the same retail price they're offered for at Apple Stores. The company said that it plans to sell the iPad on its Web site, … Read more

Unless we've miscounted somewhere along the way (a distinct possibility), this week marks the 100th episode of our little outpost on the information superhighway.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Digital City show if everything ran smoothly, so you shouldn't be surprised to find that Scott has been called away on urgent business and is here only in spirit (plus, he sent a note).

Standing in is CNET News reporter Greg Sandoval, who joins the discussion on Windows 7 phones and Google's top-secret music cloud project -- but is stunned into silence by our extreme nerd-out over the past weekend's New York Comic Con.

The rest of us, however, happily narrate our photo galleries from the show, showcasing the usual collections of costumed character and overpriced collectibles.

Speaking of collectables, in honor of our centenary, we're pleased to offer the greatest Digital City giveaway ever. We're sending one viewer/listener a sweet pile a video game t-shirts -- the ultra-rare promo-only items sent to journalists and industry insiders. These are all mint condition, never worn, and include shirts for Dead Space, GTA4, and many more.

To win the Ultimate Video Game T-Shirt Collection just hop on over to the show's Twitter account, @digitalcitycnet and follow us, then RT the post about this episode.

We'll pick a random winner at the end of the week, and there are also a pile of runner-up prizes, including some Red Dead Redemption swag and a copy of the new Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light game for DS.

Special bonus: At long last, download the show's theme song as a free MP3 here!

… Read more

Games running on Apple's iOS are starting to match prime-time television shows in overall consumption, a new study from Flurry Analytics claims.

According to the research company, 19 million people currently spend an average of 22 minutes each day playing iOS games, or accessing social networks on their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. That total number of users easily eclipses viewership of Sunday Night Football games, "Undercover Boss," and other top shows. It's also just 4 million viewers shy of top show "American Idol."

That said, Flurry's numbers could be quite low, compared … Read more

LONDON--For someone interested in capitalizing on the new era of advanced Web standards, you'd think Google would be a pretty good employer. After all, it's got an up-and coming browser, some of the world's most influential Web applications, and plenty of money to invest in both.

But in the culture of Silicon Valley, sometimes there's a time to strike off on one's own, and that's what Brad Neuberg, a very visible Web programmer at Google, decided to do. He announced his departure on the eve of a speech last week at the Future of Web Apps conference here.

In an interview with CNET afterward, Neuberg said he plans to launch a San Francisco start-up in November focusing on the same suite of Web technology he's been steeped in at Google. He's cagey on details, but he said he plans to focus on Web applications for consumers.

"I drank the HTML5 Kool-Aid," he said, saying it and other Web standards are fueling a new wave of entrepreneurial activity. " I really believe we're starting to see those start-ups. We'll see that accelerate in the next six months to a year and a half."

Plus, he didn't like spending three hours a day commuting from San Francisco to Google's Mountain View, Calif., offices and back for two years and nine months of his life.

"What am I sacrificing? It didn't all fit," he said. "I should be doing what I would do if I won the lottery," so now he's begun trying to gather a group of like-minded folk for the start-up. … Read more

A release from marketing researcher Gartner this week shows the "Hype Cycle" peaking for media tablets like Apple's iPad, along with other technologies that are currently riveting consumers' attention, such as 3D displays.

What exactly is the Hype Cycle? Jackie Fenn, a Gartner research vice president, describes it as follows: "What happens is that people get very excited and have very high expectations for a technology. And we get what we characterize as the peak of inflated expectations, where everyone feels they have to be involved or they're going to be left out."

Fenn continues: "In fact, the technology is often immature at that point, so a lot of people who try it don't get the value that they thought they were going to get. You get a trough of disillusionment, where you get a backlash against the technology, probably going too far the other way before you settle down and people start to understand how you do use the technology."

The October 9 Gartner release highlights "high-impact technologies," such as the iPad and other media tablets, wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and private cloud computing. 4G mobile broadband is also shown as peaking.

Because Gartner generally describes these technologies as immature and not fully understood by consumers (nor suppliers), it is interesting to speculate about how the iPad,… Read more

Microsoft has a lot riding on the success of the upcoming Windows Phone 7. The same could also be said of CEO Steve Ballmer.

Consider, for instance, the recent judgment rendered by Microsoft's board, which has signaled some dissatisfaction with Ballmer's job performance by cutting his bonus for 2010. One key reason: Microsoft's aborted mobile foray with the short-lived Kin.

Other reasons Ballmer didn't get his full potential bonus, according to the board, included the overall loss of market share in the mobile phone business, along with the need for Microsoft to "pursue innovations" … Read more

If you were questioning how much influence the iPad has in our education system, Discovery Education may be part of the answer. The company announced today a new optimized version of its platform, specifically for the iPad.

Discovery Education provides curriculum-based digital content to more than half of U.S. schools. The company said the launch of its iPad platform supports "educators in their efforts to integrate cutting-edge hardware and dynamic digital content into curricula."

Discovery said the iPad version that's available today includes more than 33,000 videos from Discovery Education streaming, Discovery Education Science, and … Read more

The iPad's initial sales rate has surpassed that of the iPhone and the DVD player, making it a "runaway success of unprecedented proportion," a Bernstein Research analyst said in a note to investors earlier this week.

With Apple selling 3 million iPads over the first 80 days and an estimated 4.5 million over the three months ending in September, Bernstein Research retail analyst Colin McGranahan said that the tablet is destroying all previous records of consumer electronics adoption.

Specifically, sales of the iPad have shot past the 1 million iPhone handsets sold during the smartphone's first quarter and the under 6 million sold during the full year of the phone's 2007 debut. The numbers quoted for the iPad and iPhone are all on a global basis, though McGranahan told CNET the assumption from his end is that around 45 percent of iPad sales today are in the U.S.

Sales of Apple's popular tablet have also greatly outpaced those of the DVD player, which had been the largest-selling non-phone electronic product with 350,000 units sold just in the United States in the first year, according to data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Originally unveiled in Japan, DVD players hit the U.S. market in early 1997. The first DVD players were pricey, selling for close to $1,000, though the cost quickly dropped over the following years. It wasn't until 2002 that DVD players were selling at around 4 million per quarter in the U.S., a number that's about the same today, according to the CEA.

Based on McGranahan's estimate of 4.5 million iPads sold over the past three months, which Fortune says is actually a below-average forecast among the analysts who follow Apple, consensus is that Apple has so far sold around 8.25 million tablets. Apple is due to release its earnings report for its fiscal fourth quarter October 18.

The iPad is due to capture around $12 billion in global sales for the year, according to McGranahan's note, which is also bullishly predicting sales of almost $20 billion next year, with around $9 billion in the U.S. alone. Those numbers contrast with the entire U.S. consumer PC market, which takes in sales of around $25 billion annually, and the U.S. notebook/Netbook market, which sees sales of around $19 billion a year.… Read more

CNET TV's Brian Tong takes a look at the latest in the world of Apple. This week, Apple begins shipping the new Apple TV, BlackBerry announces what they hope is the first real iPad challenger, and Hungry Shark swims its way to the App of the Week. Also be sure to check out the new Apple TV walk-through.

On an iOS device? View the Apple Byte… Read more